What is Recovery-Oriented Care

The key to recovery-oriented mental health care is patient involvement. While it complements the medical model, it requires their consent to develop custom goals for their recovery and meet lifestyle goals. It also requires the person to maintain self-determined motivation from the first treatment phase to achieve the desired results.

The core of the recovery-oriented model is to provide services that support a person to build and support a meaningful and satisfying life. Developing a strong, positive personal identity keeps them functioning.

This forward-looking base is effective even if the individual has ongoing mental health issues. This differentiates from a biomedical approach, moving to a holistic course of treatment for continued wellbeing that builds on individual strengths.

The recovery-oriented approach aims to foster hope, personal goal setting, social inclusion, community participation, personal goal setting, and ultimately self-management.

This is set up by using a coaching relationship between patients and the mental health professionals who are helping them. A peer component is also used. This taps into others who have experienced the patient’s affliction to also help in their recovery. These people rely on similar paths. They’re able to utilize their experience to identify with a patient who’s in an earlier phase of recovery.

The cornerstones of recovery-oriented mental health practice are:

• Treatment supports a person to define their goals and aspirations.
• Receiving personalized and strengths-based care that’s responsive to their specific needs, strengths, circumstances, and preferences.
• An individual’s self-determination and self-management of their mental health and wellbeing.
• Taking an integrated approach covering factors impacting a person’s wellbeing. These include family and social relationships, housing, education, and employment.
• Propelling a person’s social inclusion and community participation.
• Factoring in positive risk-taking for an individual’s recovery journey. Preparations for providing guidance, training, and support to staff with flexibility and responsiveness to a person’s circumstances and preferences.

What is Needed for Inpatient Facility Recovery-Oriented Care

University of Melbourne Health Science published guidelines for a successful facility-based recovery-oriented care program. They found the organizational culture to be the hallmark of sustainable success. A commitment to help reorientation to a recovery approach was necessary, embedding recovery principles throughout treatment.

This move facilitates recovery principles being implemented in all management processes. This includes operational policies, staff recruitment, professional development of recovery values and language, supervision, appraisal, audit, and service planning.

The organizational policies needed encompass informing staff of patient rights, complaint processes, treatment and advocacy support options, and access to records. A culture of a peer support workforce will help in this transformation.

The peer component must be in-step with a patient’s behavioral health practitioners. Involving people with lived experience should be in-tandem in processes. These include training and development, and quality of life improvement activities. This prepares everyone involved with a patient to be responsive to their feedback. It uses outcome measures, surveys, and quality audits, for service planning and evaluation.

Partnerships among patients with their lived experience supporters, and service providers for an integrated and coordinated level of care are key. This enables the use of evidence-based interventions that help in achieving the best outcomes for people’s mental health and wellbeing. It helps utilize models of care including strengths-based approaches and individual recovery-oriented planning.

Is Recovery-Oriented Care Effective for Inpatient Mental Health Treatment

By using emotional support that improves the recovery of mental health patients, recovery-oriented healthcare staff can reduce patients’ mental illness symptoms.

A study by Walden University shows that psychiatric healthcare recovery-oriented teams have proven successful in rehabilitative facilities. They’re seeing more positive health outcomes than in settings where patients are isolated during recovery. The findings show people’s health outcomes include higher quality of care and consumer satisfaction. These two factors affect the sustainability of healthcare systems implementing recovery care, impacting increased productivity and operational efficiency.

The financial benefits of recovery-oriented care also work for behavioral health organizations. The impacts are both economic and social.

One is cost-effectiveness. Recovery care administered in residential treatment centers reduces the length of a patient’s stay, as well as the cost. This also leads to a reduction of associated stress among patients in treatment. Patients with hope for a quicker return to a fulfilling life are also good for business. It also showcases a treatment facility’s capabilities to the rest of the healthcare community.

What Results Should Practitioners Expect

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), recovery-oriented care management shifts from an acute to a chronic care approach. This reflects the treatment model’s service commitment to long-term wellness support. The principles supporting care address screening of health conditions, early intervention, medication management,  treatment plans, and reinforcement of healthy lifestyles.

Recovery management engages individuals, while their families are empowered to support the needs of their loved ones. There’s no singular formula of practices that serves everyone equally. Different people need different resources.

It’s the role of recovery management to coordinate access to resources and create engagement. The collaborative work, including criminal justice, education, child welfare, primary care, and others needed, supplies the support necessary to sustain recovery.

SAMHSA outlines four dimensions that support recovery following inpatient treatment:

• Health: To manage or recover from mental illness, people must make choices that support both their physical and mental well-being.

• Home: People need a safe and stable place to live, to remove this potentially stressful element of their life.

• Purpose: Meaningful daily routines such as school, work, family, and community participation, are vital to promoting ongoing wellness.

• Community: Supportive social relationships provide love, emotional availability, and the respect people need to support mental health.

Evaluating Success

Recovery-oriented patient care involves many factors. Success requires an inpatient mental health practice to constantly evaluate processes and patient recoveries.

Evaluation is integral to change management. It promotes sustainability of effective policies, programs, and practices, and factors into funding decisions. Program data guides clinicians and other service providers when they are working with patients. On the consumer side, it helps with a patient’s decision making, and in educating their life experience peers.

With mechanisms to collect health information and clinical operations data, it’s possible to find areas for performance improvements. Surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder interviews are evaluation tools used to improve treatment results.

Inpatient Care Improved Through Process Automation

For psychiatric hospitals and other inpatient care facilities, records management among a team of service providers is an ongoing challenge. A benefit for your organization is to fully automate patient record data capture, organization, and workflow. This provides better patient care ability while achieving compliance mandates and billing ability.

InSync’s Behavioral Healthcare Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) platform is designed with direct input from behavioral health providers. This led to the creation of a system that encompasses how inpatient facilities actually operate. It ensures greater efficiency and increasingly productive encounters.

This cloud-based software provides you with a single-source platform, designed to reduce patient information keying and provide data accessibility. It stays current with the times, with ten updates implemented each year.

Tools for your team include adding encounter therapy notes easily on each patient’s face sheet to update patient records. This enables all members of each patient’s care team to share information for recovery-oriented care collaboration. Encounter and services billing is also included to account for all aspects of care compensation.

Schedule a demo now to see how to achieve your specifically configured workflow for patient care and ongoing operational cost savings.